Outdoor Fall Decorating/ Life Lately

To every person who reached out to me through comments/emails/texts after my post last Friday, thank you. It means the world to me that you are here and while my world and story aren't always picture perfect  I am so thankful to have each and every one of you here for it.

On a lighter note today I'm sharing what we've been up to lately...which honestly isn't much! Are you still laying low where you are? In some ways it seems like things are a little more back to normal because I feel more comfortable going into stores, school has started in person/hybrid here, and it just feels like life is a little more normal. However, on the other end of the spectrum everyone is still in a mask all the time, I still work from home nearly all the time, and we don't have a lot of plans besides being around the house! I love being at home so I truly don't mind that part of it, but it leaves me with not too much besides house updates!

This past Saturday my papa and his girlfriend Vivian stopped by to visit us (well mostly Sophie) and it was so nice to have some visitors! Sophie was fairly well behaved and loved being fed a million treats and gaining a new toy. While they were visiting they mentioned stopping at a farm and once they left Tim and I decided to head to a local farm to pick up some outdoor fall decor. We love going to Shickasheen Farm and if you are in the South County area they are a great side of the road farm stand with awesome prices! Our friend Emma and her husband run it along with their family and we loved getting the chance to chat with Emma a bit and pick up a pumpkin and a couple of mums for our front steps. Emma mentioned that they were going to have some more pumpkins soon, so I will definitely be back for some more decor soon!

I love having a bit of fall sprinkled on my front steps. I also recently replaced my front door mat and bought a new buffalo check mat for underneath as well. Both were purchased on Amazon and I love them! Quick question for you, how often do you replace outdoor mats? I am finding that mine wear out super quick, but they are exposed to the elements (no overhang) so I suppose it makes sense. I just assumed they lasted a bit longer, but maybe I just paid no attention when I was younger and living at home!

Oh, football is back! Thanks Soph for the reminder! 

We have been busy drafting fantasy football teams and watching the first week of games. I was quite pleased that the Patriots won on Sunday afternoon and even more pleased when Tampa Bay had a terrible game. Brady and Gronk weren't looking great and I selfishly enjoyed watching those traitors suffer. If you've been around for awhile, you know I have always loved Gronk so I feel a bit betrayed by him. Brady I think all of New England is angry with but I don't know what he expected to happen.

It's nice to have football back on for another bit of normalcy since Tim and I spend most of our Sunday with football on the tv!

We are still going on a lot of walks around here! Tim said to me the other day that no other dog in the neighborhood seems to be getting two walks a day...but this girl does! I have been doing a healthy living program lately and I will talk about it soon, but it is definitely encouraging me to get out and be active every day! 

So that's what's been up around here lately. Let me know what you've been up to!

 

Fire Pit Built By Tim!

 Tim finished a huge section of our fire pit recently! Before I show you what it looks like now, we have to flashback to what it looked like before...

This is the fire pit we inherited when we bought the house. Clearly a DIY half thought out fire pit. It worked but wasn't very pretty looking. Since we had extra pavers after the walkway project Tim got to work building a new fire pit where the old one was. 

We wanted the fire pit to be larger so we could easily fit a pallet on top if we wanted to. Also since they were bricks and not fire pit pavers, it was a bit harder to line them up. (I mean, I didn't do anything...it was ALL Tim...but I did practice lining them up before we actually started and it was difficult).

The pavers Tim used were these ones. They look great and we bought them when they were 25 cents a piece which was a great deal! Tim used Loctite to glue the pavers together. 

We also had crushed gravel left over from the walkway project so really the only cost was the glue to put this together. However we will be adding a steel bottom to the fire pit and adjusting this slightly because after finishing this Tim announced that pavers can explode due to heat. Scary stuff that we didn't realize before starting this project! We will get the steel insert and then surround the fire pit with white rocks. I really wanted to get Adirondack chairs ordered this year but I cannot find the cheap plastic $20 ones anywhere they are all sold out! So for now we will get the fire pit all set up and next spring I will order the Adirondack chairs.

Here is an inspiration picture for what I want it to look like next spring.

Source

Obviously our fire pit won't have expensive Adirondack chairs and it will be brick based instead of huge rocks but I love the white rocks and white chairs. I may go with a different color though, I'm not sure yet!

I just love how it turned out! I'm lucky that Tim is so OCD and is very precise. He really takes pride in these projects and they end up looking so amazing! I know it's not his choice of weekend entertainment but I love when he works on projects around the house. 

So, still quite a bit to do, but this is shaping up to be a great backyard hangout area! I can't wait for some chilly fall nights by the fire pit! 

Do you have a fire pit? Have you ever built a DIY fire pit? I want to know what your backyard looks like, what features does it have?

DIY House Projects: Creating a Garden and Covering a Well Pump

One garden down, a few more to go!

My mom has always loved to garden and her parents always loved to garden too. So, I come from a line of gardeners and I think I was destined to want to dig in the dirt. But, I have no idea what I'm doing. I thought I would start small with a little area that is in our yard up by the road.

Want to see where this started?

Believe it or not, you are looking at the same view. Crazy right? When we moved in we had this ugly rusted well pipe that was broken and sticking up out of the ground. A couple of months back Tim made a call and we got the pipe itself replaced. It was bight white and while it looked better and not rusted out, I still didn't want to look at a pipe sticking out of the ground like a Mario game.

I decided my best bet was to pick up a fake rock from Amazon and I ended up purchasing this one. Any one else with weird quarantine purchases? A huge fake rock might be the number one strangest item purchased in quarantine...but I'm not trying to start a contest or anything!

So, I dug up the area and got the fake rock set up and this is what our neighbors looked at for a couple of weeks. 

Then, I got my act together and headed to Home Depot to grab some mulch, top soil and a few plants!

I planted what I picked out and realized I needed more mulch and a few more plants so I headed to Walmart to finish up this area.

My little car can't hold too much but I got what I could fit!

I plan to shape out the area a bit more and add some more mulch on the edges to neaten it up, but I'm waiting for a few more garden areas to be dug out to get more mulch. I am so pleased with how it turned out!

I realize that in the future I may need to move some of the shrubs in the future if this tree grows, but I plan to adjust my gardens as needed. There are a few annual flowers in the front, which I plan to dig out at the end of the season and hopefully replace with tulip bulbs in the fall. Hopefully this will make this area come to life early each spring and prevent me from having to buy new flowers each season.

My main focus was to get some perennials in here so I would have to do less work in the future. I also wanted to make sure several of the plants were evergreen. Our gardens contained zero winter interest, meaning that all winter long all I saw was white snow and brown dead trees. I want to have some evergreens to see all year long!

I also planted some perennial flowers and a lilac bush. I hope these will bring some color to the garden. I mostly stuck with coral, white and pink for my colors. I have seen some gardens with a ton of color and some with the focus on only a few colors and I'm still trying to decide exactly what I prefer. 

I think when I do get tulip bulbs I will try to get only pink and white tulips to keep this area fairly color-coded. (See I'm even organizing the plants.....out of control over here!)

My plan is to stay far enough away from the well pump that if they need to dig it up for any reason it won't disturb the larger plants, but if they do it's okay. Nothing that I purchased is super expensive, so if it was dug up in the future that wouldn't be the end of the world. 

I took far too many pictures of this area and I apologize for that, but I was just so darn excited to do this area all by myself!

Up next? Gardens around the walkway, which I hopefully will be able to share with you soon!

I hope it's sunny where you are today! After some intense rain on Saturday, the sun has been shining the rest of this long weekend and I love it!

DIY House Projects: Completed Front Walkway

Today I'm sharing our completed front walkway! I can't stop gushing about my husband. I am in awe with the amazing job he did!! I never knew he was so talented at home projects but this walkway is just incredible. 

Remember where we started?

It was just an empty lawn and when we stepped off the front steps it was muddy and gross.

Then we had the moat...

Now, we have this......

Isn't it beautiful?!

I love the pattern and cannot believe what a great job he did!

He did such an amazing job and I'm so proud to have an amazing and talented husband.

My plan is to create gardens to surround this walkway with gardens and I can't wait to get this next part of the project done!

Also, do you see that little fluff ball in the window? :)

What do you think of the walkway? Have you ever built something like this before?

The Start Of Our Front Walkway

Good morning everyone! We lucked out and never lost power over here, although many of our fellow Rhode Islanders weren't quite so lucky. Today I wanted to share the start of our front walkway project.

I had a ton of "big ideas" when it came to the front walkway but honestly it mostly came down to price! We ended up choosing gray pavers for the material. Our house is gray so I thought that the gray pavers would be the best choice.

Lucky for us Lowe's had a sale on gray pavers!

I was able to order them online for 60% off! When making a huge home project purchase like this I always like to look for a sale. I knew we would be spending a big chunk of money but saving 60% off a big chunk of money makes my deal loving heart so so happy. So 1000 pavers later we had two pallets sitting outside ready to go!

Tim and I spent some time laying out rope to see where we wanted the walkway to lay.

We plan on bringing the gardens to wrap around the walkway so hopefully it will look really nice once we finish, make the gardens look nice, and get some nice looking grass in here!

Now here we go with the before pictures:

Now we were able to get started laying the pavers.

I highly recommend laying out a row or two of pavers so you can see the flow of the walkway. Sophie was very interested in what was happening. 

We kept going back and forth between a curved edge and a flat edge. You will have to come back to see what we decide!

This past Saturday was digging day! We attempted to both dig with Sophie around and......

it wasn't working. Sophie was interested in what we were doing, wanted to dig in other areas and was just crazy. So I left Tim to dig and sat with Sophie inside. Just when Tim was ready to quit, our neighbor came over to help! We are so grateful because with his help Tim was able to get the whole walkway dug out!

There are now a million other steps to complete before this walkway is done, but we are excited that this part is complete!

Sophie was thrilled to roll around in the dirt and mulch.

Poor Tim was exhausted.

But check out our moat! I kept joking in the torrential downpour on Monday that we could get some alligators and turn this into a moat.

Here's Sophie watching her dad work.

Some more pictures throughout the process. 

Now, over the past few days we haven't really been using our front steps since there is a big muddy drop at the bottom, but it makes me hopeful when I look out and see our new moat :)

Have you ever put in a walkway or another outdoor project like this?

Have a great day!

Adventures In Gardening: The Beginning

Something super exciting and terrifying for me with owning our own home is having an outdoor area to decorate and maintain.

Now, I have a lot of ideas and a ton of decisions to make as far as our landscaping in both our front and backyard. Since spring is about to finally roll around, the weather is finally not frigid, and it actually is light out when I get home from work at night I've decided to start taking a look at our front gardens.

When I walked outside last week here is what I saw:

Last fall I trimmed nothing down, I just let everything sit the way it was throughout the winter. I really have no clue what is going to pop up in this garden since we are just passing the 6 month mark of owning this home (TOMORROW!). I only had a few minutes since Sophie was barking at the front door but I ran outside with my new clippers and gardening gloves and got to work.

All I wanted to do was trim down all the stems and get some of the junk out of there. There were a ton of dead leaves and remnants from whatever grew there last year. I figured that by cleaning it up a little bit I would have more of a clean slate when I finally make a decision on what to do out here.

There is still a lot of junk that needs to be pulled out but I ran out of time.

Like I said, I don't know what everything is but I do not that nothing survived the winter. I want to make sure when I do plant new things in the front gardens we have at least something that will last and show some interest in the winter.

My first thoughts are boxwoods or some sort of dwarf pine but I am open to suggestions if anyone has ideas! I also would like to plant a few other things our here because I wasn't a huge fan of what I saw here in the fall.

There is some sort of plant coming up under the leaves! I will have to get back outside soon and clean this up a bit more. This also reminds me that I need to buy a wheelbarrow and a rake....home costs never end!

Also we have some crocuses poking out near the stairs! I do think these will be pretty so I am planning on leaving them for now.

If you are curious what the garden looked like in the fall when we moved in here are a couple of pictures...

I did download an app last year so I could identify what everything was, but honestly I didn't recognize a lot of it. I am definitely going to add some plants in here and freshen it up a bit and I'll take you guys along for the journey with me! 

Also please send me any and all of your gardening expertise because I am in way over my head here!